The market is strange to her, too loud and full of life, too bright with colors. She's too used to the darkness, to the silence broken up by nothing more than the ebb and flow of her cold, frozen breaths. Everything here to too alive for her, Isra of the sea-- the girl who did not want to live her life at all.
Deep in her memories, locked away in a chest a certain blackness rattles and shakes. It wants her to recall, that something, to remember what life it was exactly that she didn't want to live. But she only remembers that brine sting of the sea in dreams and what came before that in flashes that are too quick to grasp. They flutter past her eyelids quick as dragonfly wings, shining in the way that blood shines under the moonlight.
A horse yells to another, shrill and demanding, and she forgets what forgotten thing she was trying to remember in the first place.
She digests the smell of this place, rank with sweat despite the coolness of the night. It's a heavy enough smell in her nose that she grinds her teeth together so that she might swallow the soft hint of jasmine and apples that hang like thin, fragile webs of mist in the air. It burns, this place and her eyes are white and wide with fright as she strays back, back, back to the shadows of the stone walls. There she tosses her horn into the blackness before her, tucked away behind the tents and lively horses, to see what monsters she might flesh out.
Already she wants to run back to her corners of heavy dust and the thick silence that soothes her like a hot, summer sea. But her stomach rumbles again and her skin stings where it's pulled too taunt against her ribs and the jut of her hip bones. So on she goes, the past chasing her like a miasma nipping at her heels, on and on and on until there is a barrels of apples that has been left forgotten at the corner of a table.
Quick as a snake she darts for the food, her stomach rumbling like a dragon underwater. But as she moves from the shadows the moon glints on her horn until she sparkles like obsidian and the scales of her belly glitter like a starlight sea.
Isra knows that too much of her is in the light now, it stings.
And she can feel for the first time, like something that hasn't been forgotten. For the eyes on her (from where she cannot tell in the inferno of her fear) are white hot and her skin shivers like a million spiders are crawling all over her. She would rather be that tidal wave of memories locked away deep in the dark of her mind-- something left to fade away and die alone.
She's too afraid too look, to seek out those burning, predator eyes. So she tries to grab an apple anyway (her hunger is too ravenous to be soothed with fear) before sinking back into the blessed and black shadows of the wall.
It was an accident that he noticed her at all, dark as a shadow even under the moonlight. He’d been looking beyond her, distracted by a flash of blonde that snared his attention, made him wonder –
But no. Surely Bexley was only dusty bones by now.
That thought, too, made him uneasy, angry in a way he couldn’t put a word to. And so he was glad to give his notice to a glimmer of moonlight on a horn, gladder still when he saw what the girl it belonged to was doing. The buckskin could be silent when he wanted; subtle as a shadow himself he slipped nearer until he stood just beyond her shoulder.
Acton reached out with his telekinesis and snatched the apple before she could, clicking his teeth in a soft admonition.
“That was clumsy, little thief,” he said, voice low, and ran his fire-bright gaze over her. There was nothing that spurred his memory, and several things he would remember if he’d seen them before – the long point of her horn, the bright blue of her eyes, the glimmer like fish-scales or crushed gemstones along her stomach.
All those things snared his attention, but as clear as any of them were her hunger and her fear. Those things he did remember, and it kept him from grinning.
With a shrug he offered her the apple, then his gaze darted briefly on the merchant, still distracted on the other side of the street. It was back on the stranger before she could vanish on him. “Follow me,” he said, and now he did smile, and motion away with a tilt of his chin. “And tell me who you are.”
He did not add that she should be glad he was the one who caught her, and not someone with more negative opinions regarding thieves.
She's startled when the apple jerks away and to her the night seems suddenly old and thick. Her heart flutters and her blood rushes like wild water through her veins. Run, her instincts shrill at her. Run, run, run. Quickly she steps back into the darkness and the eyes on her now feel like twin suns, burning into her flesh, scouring her skin with little marks of char and ash.
But then he talks and she focuses. The eyes are predator after all, male and fiery hot and her breath clogs in her lungs and her blood rushes violently. Deep down the blackness rattles in her mind, screaming a warning that she is too afraid to hear. His words are nothing, mere jumbles of sound paired with the gestures of his face. It's been so long since she's heard a voice so close, so different than that quiet muffled echoes of the sea.
“Don't” She panics when he moves closer and his flesh seems a little brighter the the sun in the moonlight. He's a snare, vibrant against the night and she thinks she might be nothing more than a plain, mouse ripe and weak for the hunt. Only when he doesn't move closer does she relax enough to breath and her lungs are frantic from panic and the night air burns and stings her throat like smoke.
Isra's gaze is intense and winter cold as she judges him. When he offers her the apple she's quick to take it , barely tasting the sweet pulp of it as she devours the first food she's had in days. Still she feels like a cornered beast, frantic and broken and unsure if she wants to just surrender to the danger of him. The sea had taken away her salvation and she's desperate to feel anything at all but anxious.
Perhaps that's why she follows him and forgets for a moment to step light enough to hush the jangle of rusted chain on her leg. It's loud in the quiet of the shadows and she looks at him to see the sound has given her away. She knows it's important, that chain about her leg, knows that no one should learn it's meaning. But she's forgotten the meaning herself and that makes her more afraid of her own skin that anything else.
“I am...” She pauses, gazing out into the nothing of the darkness. Who am I? She thinks she might have know at once point. She might have know what purpose the words churning like squalls in her mind might have served. All she knows is that she is here, in this place and made of flesh and bone (although she wonders if he might see nothing more than some ghost of a horse, a reflection in a wave blurry and white with sea-foam).
The pauses draws out too long, brittle and broken up with the steady way she breathes in and out to focus herself. She looks down at her skin, watching the chain catch the moonlight. She follows the curve of her ribs to the dusting of scales on her belly, sea green and somehow terrifying to her. “I am Isra.” Her voice is uncertain, as if there is a silent wondering to her answer, as if she doesn't even know who she is.
What does he see, she queries to her self silently, when he looks at him. Am I flesh and bone, am I broken and bloody or am I nothing more than a mare given shape and form by the selfishness of a sea-god? The words jangle in the abyss of her, forming a story that she has forgotten how to form sounds with.
“Who are you and where am I to follow you?” Isra tries to make the question sound like a demand and fill her voice with a confidence she doesn't know if she ever knew. But her voice is nothing more than a whisper of surf in the night, dusted with the melancholy of falling stars that turn to dust and wishes as they enter the atmosphere.
Still, she follows him this night, giving up her fate once more to a man.
Her gaze on his was almost painfully blue, the sky over the ocean after a storm, reminding him of another’s. But there was no anger, no violence, in these eyes – only the kind of fear that does the opposite of make him feel bigger, more powerful. Acton wondered then if he had looked the same, as a colt: half-starved, fearful of shadows and light both. If he had, then it was brief; it didn’t take him long to learn to fight, to plan, to wipe his bloody noses on his shoulder and give as good as he got.
It was that or break. The buckskin didn’t wonder yet if she had broken.
Don’t, she breathed, and Acton stopped. He said nothing as she scarfed the apple, only kept his attention half on the stall merchant, inhaling the sweet scent of the fruit as its skin split, baring pale flesh. A few moments and it was gone, and she was stepping after him –
Soft as a spilled secret, he heard the chime and sigh of her chains and paused, looking down. He said nothing, only lifted his gaze to hers and then away, but he knew what it meant perhaps better than she.
They were active docks, there in Denocte, and many things were traded in the dark with the moonlight trembling on the sea. The thought of it made something cold and hard turn over in his belly, and he licked his teeth and walked on.
Now they were less alone, though still anonymous in a stream of bodies, and he did his best to guide them through dim torchlit paths without running into others. He kept an ear trained on her, and grinned at the long pause in her answer. Acton snuck a glance at her, and found himself fascinated by the way she studied her own body as though it was new to her. As though she didn’t know it at all. “If you say so,” he said when finally she answered, arching a brow at her.
There is something a little bolder the next time she speaks, and his grin doesn’t vanish at her question. He whisked his dark tail, flicking it against her side, and watched their shadows mingle on the gleaming cobblestones as they wound between more stalls.
“I’m Acton,” he answered, “and I haven’t decided that yet. But first, I think, we’ll find you something to eat. I’ve seen skeletons with more meat on their bones.” A few lengths ahead, he spied a merchant he knew, selling bowls of warm bran sweetened with honey. He shifted that direction, and then paused and turned toward the girl.
He did not blink before those oceanwater eyes, and he did not wrinkle his nose at the salty tang that clung to her hair, the sweet-bitter brine that made him think of his days as a boy winding through a distant harbor. He only leaned in close, and held her gaze, and let the smile fall away from his mouth. Echoing in his ears was the sound of her chains; he did not see that they were covered in rust like old blood. He did not know they were only memories. “You are safe with me, but I need to know, now, if someone is searching for you.”
He is suddenly a ship in the harbor of her anxiety, a sun to guide her through the sea of flesh and voices that ring like death bells in her ears. The night market presses in at her and she skitters into him like a child, pressing closer to him as other bump and sway against the hollow girl. She thinks they must see only a shadow, a flash of darkness that blends into the bold outline of the shadow.
Let them forget me, she thinks, let their eyes wash over me like surf to the sand.
Isra is too frantic to notice the way that his shadow blends into her, to notice that she even leaves a shadow at all. All she can see is the brightness of him and everything else is a kaleidoscope of color and sound that is too blinding for her to look at. And so she presses her nose to him, tastes the sting of something dangerous in the scent of his skin and continues onward to whatever place he has chosen to lead her.
“Acton.” She repeats his name idly, wondering why the way her lips fold around his name feels so strange and wonderful and terrifying all at once. Has she ever known a name, she wonders, like his. Has she known any names at all or have there ever been only the ghosts of memories to keep her company?
In the end she decides that it doesn't matter and she wanders off her in own mind to some strange world of beasts that have always known exactly what they are. Deep down, some part of her that remembers something other than fear trills in excitement that this is nothing more than some grand adventure she will tell for years and years to come.
It's too deep, that part of her that once resided inside golden, youthful skin and she can't dredge up more than a soft flutter of her heart.
When he stops it's sudden and she lurches into him, too light and fragile to make it feel like more than a nudge. Isra dances away, avoiding the way his eyes seem too heavy, too knowing when she braves a questioning, shy glance at him. Her chain rattles with the movement and flecks of rust fall like blood-diamond dust in the dull night light.
She doesn't let him know how hungry she is, how much she feels like she is dying, wasting away to become the ghost that she feels like. Something in her warns her about seeming so graceless and weak, as if he is some beast that will devour her if he knows that she's begging to finally reach some end. Instead she only whispers and leans a black leg back into the shadows, back to the place where his gaze won't seem so alive on her skin. “I don't know if there is anyone to look for me. If there is I have forgotten them.” Isra tumbles over the admission, glancing up at him in apology, thinking that it must be a strange thing for her not to know.
“Should someone ask for me and perhaps find me you should forget me too. I would not endanger another.” She doesn't admit it, but there is a heaviness to gaze that says it must be a dangerous person to look for a mare who doesn't know her own skin. No kind horse would look for a ghost with the sea on her skin and an ocean of black where memories should be. Isra leans another leg into the blackness at her back, giving him a chance to change his mind and melt back into the currents of bodies all around him.
She's half gone, half leaning towards the heat of his skin when she finally gathers enough courage to ask him the question she knows that she should have asked sooner. “Why would you keep me safe?” There is a flicker of hope in her eyes, a whisper of calm surf in the storm of her fear. Isra though isn't aware that the churning of her soul is anything more that the gnaw of her hunger and all the words she has forgotten how to say.
Hope too, is a thing she no longer can remember if she ever knew it at all.
* * * * *
flowers are up in the air
crashing against the dark
It had been a long time since he’d heard his name spoken like that – no inflection of knowing, whether humor or anger or long-suffering distaste. On her tongue his name sounded new, and he liked it, the same way he liked how she pressed her nose against his skin as if he was trustworthy.
The liking made something deep inside him twist. He if were better at self-reflection – if he were given to it at all – he might call it worry, or maybe shame.
But he is not. Instead he grinned, and leaned into her brief touch, and inhaled all the wild scents of the night market, smoke and spice and perfume that always tasted old (like home) and new (like trouble) all at once.
He was not sorry when she bumped into him, and he did not feel guilty for the way his gaze sought hers even as her eyes danced away. Acton was too bold himself to let her seek out the shadows: they were only for hiding when you were on the hunt.
The girl’s answer sounded honest enough, when it came, and he did not find it so strange. Acton cocked a hoof in the semi-darkness and considered her. “I see,” he said, and though there was a dark edge to it, it was not a lie.
He remembered running. He remembered not knowing if anyone was coming after him – he remembered wondering if they were, long after the smell of smoke had faded from his coat and the ghost of it was gone from his nostrils. Long after he stopped seeing flames when he closed his eyes.
They were not things he enjoyed remembering.
Maybe that is why he bared his teeth at the idea that he should forget her; maybe that is why his amber eyes flashed bright in the dark mask of his face. It was not directed at her, and the black look faded quickly; Acton leaned forward, neck arched, and breathed a warm breath onto her cheek. Here was another thing he liked: she did not smell perfumed like the rest of them, sweet and soft and sly.
“Not even my friends get to tell me what to do,” he said in her ear, and then he pulled away, the grin re-conjured, and turned back to the market. There was no fear in him, no matter the black seawater beneath her words; he was too careless, too arrogant to be afraid.
He looked back only at her question, and he tried to think nothing of the flicker in her eyes blue as chips of sea-glass.
“I know this city as well as myself,” he said as the night breeze kissed his cheek, his shoulder, and ran its fingers through his hair. “And it knows me. If anyone touched you they would pay in blood.” It was not quite an answer for the question she had asked, but Acton didn’t mind. He only rolled his shoulder in a shrug and added, “Stay here.”
He didn’t think she’d run in the brief time his back was turned – not when he was coming back with food. For the moment, at least, she’d looked more hungry than scared.
Perhaps it's the way his eyes darken to storm clouds and explosions with no warning at all that makes her tremble. Perhaps it's the way this his breath feels like dragon fire against the winter cold of her skin. Perhaps it's nothing more than being too close too soon to something other than dust and cobwebs and darkness.
But tremble she does, her skin feels like paper thin leaves over the bark of her bones. She wavers in the night wind that caresses him so. It's not kind to her this night and it whistles through the hollows of her with a bitter, broken sound. Isra is more terrified of the way he is too close than anything else. All she would have to do is sway a little and they would be cheek to cheek, sunlight to gauntness.
It remembers, that chest of her memories, the feel of a hot breath on her skin and the touch of lips too close to her ears. Blurry images flash across her gaze and Acton shifts into something else, someone larger. She's nauseous at the vertigo of the flickering image, but the moon shines brighter as a cloud blows away and she forgets why she feels so very sick.
Part of her likes the way he smells, smoke and fire and starlight. She wonders, which sensation contributes more to the rolling waves of her stomach, the fear or the anticipation of him.
She's spent too long in the confines of her mind again, forgetting that others make words with their lips to share their though. She has forgotten there is a language other than her own and she watches him walk away belatedly. “That is no answer at all.” He's too far away to hear but she bleats the words into the darkness anyway, needing some release from that shiver of her flesh and the thrill of danger that screams.
Run, run, run.
Her mind tell her to run even now and the chain on her leg jingles like wind-chimes with the fine trembling of her muscles. She's leaning into the shadows at her back, hunger forgotten and eager to flee, when he returns.
All she can hear when he smiles are her is the faint echo of how his voice sounded over the word, blood, how easy to was for him to speak of vengeance.
The world tilts, and she presses her eyelids tight and tucks her nose to her chest. The gesture points her horn in that wide space between his eyes but she's too lost to the way she can see flashes of blood running down her body to know that she silently threatens him.
It's the smell of mash and honey that brings her from the reverie and her eyes are wet and wide with terror and appreciation for the kindness he offers. She's still slow to step towards him, to leave the embrace of those shadows and their silence. “Thank you.” Carefully she reaches out her nose to him, offering a touch not too unlike a wild beast trapped in a snare who knows it is not a hunter who has found them.
But her soul is slower to trust. Her soul, broken and shrouded in darkness, knows that kindness is a trick and that it might not survive another fall.
He hadn’t thought she’d slip away, but there was still a measure of relief that rose up in him, warm and strange, when he returned to her. Acton took his time about it: for a long moment he lingered, watching the way she hid herself in shadows. She tried her best – she was practiced at it, he could see – but the moonlight loved her too much. It gave her away, beading silver along her horn, glinting on scales as if on waves. Even the juts of her ribs and hips it kissed – even the chains, though they hid best of all.
Already his mouth was open to speak when he returned, but he was surprised into silence when she leveled her horn at him. It flashed like a knife; it carried him to other nights, violent delights. He doesn’t know what he would have done had her eyes not been closed.
But they were, and her body did not say attack, save for the solemn threat of her horn. So Acton said nothing, only huffed a breath that might have been a laugh, and waited for her to open her eyes again. Her touch on him was payment enough, burning where the moonlight soothed.
She was hungry, but so was he. Everything she did made him hungry for knowledge of her. It was an effort not to stare as she ate, thought the night was, as ever, full of delights. Wild as they were, all of them were known, all of them bred through familiarity to background noise. All but one.
“Don’t thank me yet,” he said, and the line of his mouth tugged up. “Only the first meal is free around here.” He cast a glance again at the crowds who passed around them; most were strangers, and most made an effort not to meet his gaze. “You know anyone in Denocte, Isra? Where were you headed?”
Never mind that she might not want to tell a stranger any more about herself. He ignored the fear in her, and thought instead of the way her horn had not trembled when it was aimed between his eyes.
There is small part, buried deep inside the cracks of her soul and in the thump of her heart that goes on, that chants over and over again. Survive, it says. Sometimes it overlays the sound of run, run, run as it whispers in and out of her bones like the wind through valleys. Other times that word, survive, is on it's own. It's quieter in those moments, as if it is only the part of her soul that longs, that whispers.
Those are the times she longs for something and the gnawing in her belly feels like it needs more than food and water. That's when the hunger feels like it could devour the moon, the stars and drink the sea until it's dry. Even then, she thinks, that rabid hunger might not be satisfied.
Isra is never quite sure what it wants with her, that soul that even the sea-god could not touch. Perhaps she knew once, perhaps her soul like her body was long ago familiar to her. Now she is little more than a machine, flesh that eats and moves and talks when the world requires it of her.
She looks at Acton, forgetting already what it was that kept her from the shadows, kept her next to him when silence was so soothing to her. Her eyes skip over him again, remembering all the things she's already noticed about him. Already they've slipped away, away with the memories she cannot recall (doesn't want to recall).
He pushes her too much and she's not sure how she knows this. But push her he does and when that box rattles and creaks and the lid starts to open she forgets how she came to be. How did she get here? Who is he? Why does he terrify and soothe her all at once?
There is nothing for her to say when he promises that there will be no other free meals. That survive word is too loud, clamoring around as it does behind her sea-blue eyes. Instead she can only offer, a whisper that tastes like honey on her lips, a false sweetness that has little to do with her. “I have no direction in mind.” To the sea, she thinks but she doesn't say the words.
The sea calls to her, distant and deep, and she wants to go. But part of her knows that to go is to vanish forever and she doesn't want to leave this golden boy, not yet. Isra thinks no more on it, she just takes it for what it is. She will not leave Acton, not tonight, not by her own choice.
“There is no one here that I know. Only you, however shallow that knowing is.” There is more that she wants to say, just on the edge of her teeth. But it's heavy and slick like oil and she can't hold it long enough to know the words before it slides back down into her belly, back down into that needy hollow soul she doesn't know what to do with.
“If you could go anywhere where would you go?” She asks even as she decides that it is the direction she will go in. His dreams would have to be big enough to hold her. Isra has none of her own, none that she wants to recall dreaming at all.
As long as it's not towards the sea she will go as terror free as she could ever be.
“Lucky you,” he said, and the smile he wore was hooked like a scimitar for a brief moment there in the moonlight. For a moment he gloried in it, that he was her world here; there was a space of heartbeats where he wondered how long he could keep it that way. A jealous part of him wanted to keep her secret, keep her in the shadows – selfish, selfish. He was still just a boy, no matter how grown.
The thought was shaken from him by her next question. It was not something he had ever been asked; for a rare moment he was caught without a retort ready on his tongue.
He stared into those ocean eyes like he might find an answer there, but they only reminded him of the place he had been born, and he would not return there for a king’s ransom. He had shaken the ash and dust from his feet when he left that city, the theatre burning like a pyre behind him.
Eventually he remembered the bustle of bodies around them, and eventually his smile found its way back to his mouth. “Here,” he said, and even his heartbeat believed it was true. After all, what else would an orphan boy want but a home? Acton had never had anything of his own; even his dreams were shared.
He knew, then, where he would take her. To his family, to the Crows, to one of their several gathering-places in the city that would never sleep.
“Come, Isra,” he said, and reached out to touch his muzzle to her dark cheek, the smell of saltwater like tears. The gesture was casual and kindly-intended, but that did nothing to change that it was possessive, too. “I’ll show you why this is my home.”
Acton had so few secrets of his own (only one, only one); he has forgotten how to keep them, despite the piece of him that wants to.
Once more he turned away from her, to lead the way down paths dappled in moonlight and torchlight and deep living shadow, and it was some strange mixture of arrogance and belief that kept him from looking back.
